A Conversation on American Grammar with Jarvis Givens

Co-sponsored by the Aoki Center

Jarvis R. Givens

Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 6:00pm - 7:30pm, Gorman Museum of Native American Art

Lecture and Reception Free and Open to the Public

Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of Education and African & African American Studies at Harvard University, and he specializes in 19th- and 20th-century African American history and theories of race, power, and schooling. Professor Givens is the author of the following books: American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation, published by Harper in 2025; School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness, published by Beacon Press in 2023; and Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published by Harvard University Press in 2021. His most recent book is I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, published by Harper in February 2026.

Professor Givens earned his PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and his research has been published in several outlets, including The Atlantic, LA Review of Books, American Education Research Journal, Souls, Harvard Educational Review, and The Journal of African American History. Professor Givens also leads the digital humanities project, The Black Teacher Archive, which digitizes and preserves the records of Black educators and professional associations from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
 

On February 19, Professor Givens will be in conversation with UC Davis Associate Professor Lawrence T. Winn of the School of Education. The evening will also include a reception and a visit in the Gorman Museum of Native American Art. The event is hosted by the History Department and co-sponsored by the College of Letters and Science, the School of Education and Transformative Justice in Education Center, the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies at the School of Law, the Native American Studies Department, the African-American and African Studies Department, and UC Davis Inclusive Excellence.